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One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ.

Loren Eiseley

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Loren Eiseley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1907
Born: September 3
Died: 1977
Died: July 9
Anthropologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Poet
Science Writer
Lincoln
Nebraska
Still
Wonder
Hides
Men
Within
Organ
Whether
Organs
Eye
Delicate
Science
Controlled
Sense
Educated
Impinges
Light
Universal
Practitioner
Stills
Mystery
Snail

More quotes by Loren Eiseley

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Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.
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To have dragons one must have change that is the first principle of dragon lore.
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It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.
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I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us
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The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.
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This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
Loren Eiseley
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What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
Loren Eiseley
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You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.
Loren Eiseley
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At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile
Loren Eiseley
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When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.
Loren Eiseley
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The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts.
Loren Eiseley
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I am older now, and sleep less, and have seen most of what there is to see and am not very much impressed any more, I suppose, by anything.
Loren Eiseley
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It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat.
Loren Eiseley
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We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
Loren Eiseley
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It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.
Loren Eiseley
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I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.
Loren Eiseley
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Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.
Loren Eiseley
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Each one of us is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born.
Loren Eiseley
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Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.
Loren Eiseley
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The future is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves its evil and good are perpetually within us.
Loren Eiseley